To see a larger version of the photo above (which I recommend), click here.

If I could walk anyplace in New York City, it would be across the Brooklyn Bridge. I love being in the middle of the bridge, halfway between Manhattan and Brooklyn, suspended in midair by an enormous web of taut cables. Gorgeous views of the harbor and the East River spill out in front of me, and I feel like the whole world is revolving on the fulcrum of my footsteps.

As I left my house, I headed left, then over to the World Trade Center, up around southern Tribeca–and then over to the Bridge. Although I passed by the pedestrian entrance to it, next to City Hall, my coin flips did not lead me to its gracious ribbon. Instead, I walked around the court district in circles before squirting out into Chinatown and Columbus Park.

At the south end of the park, kids were playing basketball and any other game they could imagine that involved running. In the middle a man was playing badminton with his two children. At the north end, many groups of people were playing Chinese chess.

I headed back south; the streets were littered with production trucks, for Law and Order and the next Nicolas Cage movie, Lord of War–which is almost a Law and Order anagram. (Alas, it comes out only as Law or Ford.) Outside the US Court of International Trade, there’s a public park, elevated a few feet from the street, that’s a labyrinth of curving lime-green benches, with purple shadows painted underneath them.

I came back to the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge, and circled around it–at several different points, a single flip would have sent me walking over the water, but instead I headed north and finished my walk outside the courthouses, dreaming of the river running underneath my feet.